Scientific American Column: 'It's Not Cold Fusion...But It's Something' (scientificamerican.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Scientific American magazine has published a guest column on low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) [putting] into context the history of what was mistakenly referred to as cold fusion and what happened. The bottom line is that there is compelling cumulative evidence for nuclear reactions taking place, including shifts in the abundance of isotopes, element transmutations, and localized melting of metals. Furthermore, those reactions do not have the characteristics of either nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. Despite sharp criticism from much of the scientific community after the 1989 announcement by Fleischmann and Pons, the Department of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and other reputable organizations continued the research and published many papers. The article reports that "to the surprise of many people, a new field of nuclear research has emerged," adding that even in the early 20th century, atomic scientists were already reporting "inexplicable experimental evidence of elemental transmutations."

Comments

Justice.

[beheaderaswp]

Back in the 80's when my physics chops were far better I was sure they were on to something.

Just goes to show, that even in the scientific community, bias can play a part in what gets to the public. Just because they are scientists, doesn't mean they aren't human.

I hope those two guys get their due. They deserve it, and they took a ration of grief which damaged their careers. Fleischmann is dead- but someone should wrote Pons a check since he's still kicking around..

Re:Justice.

[Rei]

My thoughts too.

This in particular got me:

The Widom-Larsen theory offers a plausible explanation—localized conversion of gamma radiation to infrared radiation.

Huh? Now how is that supposed to happen?

Looking up the theory I found this article, where they describe the theory: intense electromagnetic fields at the surface dress electrons with extra mass, which allows electron capture to form a cold neutron and a neutrino. Cold neutrons are pretty much immediately captured causing a transmutation reaction. That's all pretty basic physics, if you accept the premise that you're getting heavy electrons from intense electromagnetic field effects (which they argue for). But what about the gamma? No explanation there.

I see this page tries to offer a plain-english description of the theory for the gamma:

W-L alleges that gamma emissions are anisotropic and selective in their directionality. Meaning they, for some mysterious reason, direct themselves toward the heavy electron SPP patches. These transient SPP patches are also imagined to have precisely tuned, energy specific absorptivity capabilities which seems like a stretch as well. Also the persistence of gamma absorption during the "life after death" phase is equally perplexing, as the SPP shields are thought to disappear during this phase. Not to mention delayed gammas caused by neutron absorption also create issues for this heavy electron gamma shield hypothesis

If that's accurate, that's very weak indeed...

Re:Justice.

[Solandri]

From what I remember, the bias against their claim wasn't because it was counter to accepted science - everyone was killing themselves trying to replicate the experiment - copies of their paper were being faxed and re-faxed almost to illegibility prior to publication. It was because of how they sensationalized their announcement - a full press conference with all the major TV news stations broadcasting live. I think their findings would've been much better received if they'd just published a journal article saying "we got a weird unexpectedly large energy production from this experiment - can anyone else replicate it?", instead of trying to go the rock star route as if they'd already won the Nobel Prize.

It's also worth pointing out that even fusion in stars isn't anywhere near as concentrated an energy source as regular chemical reactions. The energy production by fusion in the center of the sun is estimated to only be about 275 Watts/m^3. Less than human metabolism (average human body is less than 0.1 m^3 and gives off about 100 Watts), and about the same as a compost heap. So when you're talking about low energy nuclear reactions, you're talking about really, really low energy levels. Possibly so low as to be of no practical use other than explaining some minor discrepancies in energy measured by certain very sensitive experiments.

Re:Justice.

[Toonol]

Compared to its quality thirty years ago, it is. It has gone from a respectable scientific publication to something on the order of Popular Science. It's painful, because I absolutely loved that magazine when I was young.

Re:Justice.

[thrich81]

Stellar fusion is a whole different subject than artificial fusion. You're right that fusion output per volume or weight is quite low in stars, but that is because the fusion being done is essentially four bare protons to helium4 which must evidently (I'm too lazy to look it up) include at least one reaction in the chain with an extremely low cross section. Actually it states in the article you linked that the slow reaction in the sun's Proton-proton reaction is the first one (proton + proton -> deuteron [H1 + H1 -> H2]). No artificial fusion schemes (low or high energy, serious or crackpot) ever consider using H1 as a fuel. They all start with isotopes much, much easier to fuse (usually deuterium, tritium, or helium3). And we do have an example of a high yield artificial fusion technique -- the thermonuclear weapons, which obviously are many orders of magnitude more powerful per kilogram than stars (I know most of their yield is usually fission, but they do produce a significant positive yield from fusion).

FTA: similar results as early as 1910/1920

[mveloso]

"Perhaps most surprising is that, in the formative years of atomic science in the early 20th century, some scientists reported inexplicable experimental evidence of elemental transmutations. In the 1910s and 1920s, this research was reported in popular newspapers and magazines, and papers were published in the top scientific journals of the day, including Physical Review, Science and Nature."

Re:Ross's e-cat?

[nukeguy1000]

The SCIAM article is not at all about Rossi, the lead author of the SCIAM article is the guy who busted Rossi for fraud.

Too many scams with LENR

[GuB-42]

LENR is great for scammers. It's like free energy but with better sounding "science" behind it.
Scammers with the necessary scientific background and a good sense of misdirection can easily fool scientists. Scientists are good at finding natural causes for surprising results. However, if the result comes from deliberate trickery and that the trickster did enough research to avoid breaking all the laws of physics, scientists can be fooled like kids at a magic show.
So I thing that many of the results for LENR are poisoned by such scams and any attempt at meta-analysis is doomed.

"Guest Blog"

[Stephan Schulz]

It's a guest blog contribution, not an article by Scientific American staff. Unless it's backed by some real science, it's not significant. The first author, Steven Krivit, is a journalist with a long history of publishing borderline claims on "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions", the newish euphemism for "Cold Fusion" - i.e. he makes suggestive claims, but keeps just south of complete bullshit, to maintain some kind of intellectual deniability.

Notice how in this article he name-drops Chandrasekhar to bolster the reputation of Lewis Larsen and thus the so-called "Widom-Larsen theory" without explicitly endorsing it or claiming it explains the purported experimental evidence.

Re:As usual

[NormalVisual]

Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle.

I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.

And as usual

[Namarrgon]

Someone takes a blog article with no cited evidence as gospel truth, then crows about how it validates their personal beliefs. Particularly ironic in this case, as said personal beliefs are about scientists always jumping to biased conclusions. You don't say.

A) when scientists turn out to be wrong, who is it that proves them wrong - is it blog authors or slashdot posters? No, it's other scientists with stronger evidence.
B) there may be interesting accumulated evidence in the LENR field, but this guest blog does not cite any, so does not prove or disprove anything.
C) Many labs tried to replicate Pons and Fleischmann's work, and couldn't. The public backlash was heightened by them having gone to the press before peer review, but the real fault lay with the media over-blowing the hype prematurely - and people accepting unquestioningly everything the media said.
C) If there are, as alleged, some interesting results worthy of further study, then hopefully some labs will follow them up further. LENR falls in the extraordinary-claims basket, so the proper response for most labs is to ignore it until more speculative researchers get around to producing evidence strong enough to merit a closer look. Has that happened yet? TFA thinks so, but does not make a case a reputable lab would find compelling.

Re:How do you get slow neutrons?

[Anonymous Coward]

You get slow neutrons by moderating them, mostly in water but sometimes in graphite.

Can an AC get a "+1 thermal" around here?

Re:As usual

[Stephan Schulz]

Through the last 200+ years, scientists have had the cycle of someone saying they're wrong, they resist it, then it's proven right, and they look like stubborn and very unscientific idiots then repeat the cycle. I think the poster boy for this is Ignaz Semmelweis. The scientific community dismissed his results out of pride, and thousands died as a result.

This is just a variant of the Galileo Gambit. Yes, over the last 200 years there have been several instances where "science" (as in the majority of scientists) has been sceptical to accept paradigm-changing new claims. Semmelweis is one example, as is Alfred Wegener with his idea of continental drift. But for every genius causing a major shift in scientific opinion, there have been legions of bozos proposing perpetuum mobiles, morphic fields, magnetic water cures, electric universes, and other crap. And on the other hand, many earth-shattering new theories like relativity (both versions) and evolution have been rather quickly accepted, because they were presented with convincing arguments and testable hypotheses. As Sagan said: they also laughed at Bozo the Clown...

Initial Energy Problem Too.

[Roger W Moore]

But what about the gamma? No explanation there.

This isn't the only dodgy thing about this theory the whole electron-mass argument seems dubious looked at from a simple energy standpoint. They are claiming that the electrons in the metal hydride have a mass of well over an MeV for this to work. This is a HUGE amount of energy, about 6 orders of magnitude higher than any chemical energy. Basic energy conservation requires this mass to come from somewhere so where does it come from? Energies that large (by the time you have multiplied it by the number of electrons) are usually pretty obvious - it should be about 5-6 orders of magnitude higher than the energy stored in a battery of the same size.